Gather Up Your Bleeding Heart
by emeralddarkness
Summary: Red is such a loaded color.  oneshot   spoilers for the end


**Gather Up Your Bleeding Heart  
**emeralddarkness

**Summary:** Red is such a loaded color.

**Rating:** PG/K plus

**Disclaimer: **_Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog_ and the associated characters, scenarios, settings, etc, are the property of their respective owners; the author hiding behind the penname 'emeralddarkness' makes no claim to any of these, and is writing this story only for entertainment. Any original characters and situations are the property of emeralddarkness, and neither she nor they are in any way associated with the owners, creators and producers of _Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog_. No copyright infringement is intended.

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**It was funny, really, but red was all he could think of these days. Of course, there were a hundred associations that he could (and had) made with the color so maybe it was reasonable. Red had become a big part of his life about a week ago. Red had been a big part of his life before. And, he'd considered as he'd stood and looked at his typical white lab coat and gloves and boots, white was all wrong, and always had been. Besides, it was murder to his laundry bill. Showed every stain, and he couldn't exactly show up at a crime scene in a dirty lab coat. It would spoil the image: someone in his class of evil should have minions, who would naturally be in charge of the dirty jobs. Grunt work. Things unworthy of his time. Merely because he hadn't yet been able to find many (any, really) who passed muster was no reason not to look his best. It made an impression that could not be had any other way, when you showed up on a crime scene.

He wondered why he'd ever thought white was such a good idea. Maybe it was because it was traditional scientist garb, or maybe because even though it was difficult to keep clean some days you could easily tell when it did need washing. And, of course, doing laundry wasn't half so bad as it would have been without-

Well, maybe it was time for a change.

Penny's hair was (had been) red, there was the first association. So were (once were) her lips, and so was (had been) Penny's blood - red and coppery and surprisingly sparse, after she'd been hit. She hadn't died of bleeding to death; the wounds had been plugged by the shards of metal that had caused them, like a cork in a bottle, so her blood had been relatively safe in her veins. It had been the shock, not the blood loss, that killed her. Whether or not you were spurting blood, your mind and body never took well to suddenly having large chunks of foreign objects tearing through delicate tissues and internal organs. One of the shards - one of the _smallish_ shards, which somehow seemed horribly unfair - had lanced almost straight to her heart. That had just been too much for her, it had overloaded her brain with shocked horror. And she'd been gone.

At least, he'd thought as he slid into the funeral ("Oh, I was one of Penny's friends," he'd told people with an awkward almost-smile) the body had still looked nice. And that was ridiculous, there was no way she'd care about something so shallow, but all Billy had been able to think of was that it was good she hadn't been decapitated or horribly maimed, they'd have had to have a closed-casket funeral and things would have seemed less (or maybe more) real.

Enough of that.

His death ray had been red. Red and black it had been, all metal and plastic and ominous red lightning crackling up and down inside the glass tube that focused and honed the energies into one, well, absolutely_ horrible_ blast. He'd been proud of that weapon, it had been a work of genious. Needed a bit of readjustment maybe, that field test had certainly had a few bumps, but the concept was there. And a death ray was just menacing in ways that a stun ray or a freeze ray or genetically engineered lizards (not that that little experiment had ended well) weren't. The red was definately part of that. Red was just such a menacing color. Red was life and death, far more charged than white.

He needed to look his best for the ELE too, which had been the final nudge that made him change. It was funny really, because in a way he didn't want to, even so. But, well-

He took his colors from the death ray, from that night - from everything the death ray had _done_ - he took his colors as a symbol of society, which he was about to send crashing to its knees, he took them because red and black was a wonderful menacing villainous sort of combination, far more appropriate for an evil genious than white - black hats and white hats, jeez, everything about white was just-

In any case, that was all. That was all.

He didn't really think of much as he put on his red coat for the first time, and tugged on his new black leather-and-rubber gloves, but that hadn't been anything very unusual. He hadn't thought much for the past week or so. Maybe it was on purpose. But that didn't matter either, because he was _in_, and at last maybe he'd get the respect he deserved. It had seemed like a good choice, the new costume, when he walked through the doors. Everyone, even Bad Horse, had seemed impressed and slightly calculating. That had almost made him satisfied. His new colors also made him almost satisfied, though it made him almost feel so many other things as well through the shell of emptiness he'd developed that he'd wondered dully if it was really worth it.

Red, after all, had so many associations.

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Reviews are vastly appreciated


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